“MPEG formats and changes in codecs”
It is beneficial to have information about applications which broadcast video over the internet before talking about media formats over IPTV. Most of these applications use the video formats that we are used to. One of the most important among these formats is the MPEG technology, which is actually in the background in television broadcasting. We know that a format was created for these applications to work in the television side before IPTV applications and relaying over the internet. While MPEG 1 and 2 were uncompressed formats, with MPEG 3 audio compression was included. Thus, songs and audio formats came into the picture. Only after that MPEG was released. MPEG 4 had mostly been an infrastructure supported and used by Apple products. Microsoft started supporting it soon after. While talking about formats, it is vital to keep in mind the second most important layer of formats; the codecs. Even though first studies about codecs were unfruitful, now one of the most important parts of compression is codecs. The most popular one among these codecs is H264.
When IPTV applications are in question, as fast as the visual quality, visual technology and codecs improve, IPTV can integrate just as quickly. It is possible to explain this with such an example: If your system supports MPEG 4 and a certain codec, your IPTV application will be able to support a brand new codec with an upgrade of your set-top box thanks to the information coming from the center. This is one of the most important advantages of IPTV, the ability to upgrade. Television systems and set-top boxes weren’t able to use this function much up until lately. This was made possible by changing the BIOS or FLASH EPROM by setting up a connection over RS232, connecting your computer and relaying the information on your computer. From now on you’ll see that these applications will be done quickly over the internet and updates will be much more quicker for your set-top box. So this no longer poses a serious problem in IPTV applications which work on the software side.
However, new formats are also in question. It will soon be revealed that requirements other than visual formats have arisen. Among these needs, one of the most important ones is the emergence of formats marking the beginning and ending of advertisement zones and the formation of metadata structures containing the advertisement data which will be present in these advetisement zones. With metadata, I mean structures which include information about the content of a movie, song, visual or any kind of data.
As many of us know, ‘Meta tags’ are applications which perform these functions on the HTML side. But a determined and formalized formatting method about how these applications work hasn’t been made prominent up until now. More precisely, the standard about this subject hasn’t been formed. But the methods of governments regulating advertiisements should be included in these metadata information. Therefore we will soon see new formatting, tagging and labeling functions in the advertisement side. One of the most important among the tagging and labeling functions will be the visual tagging. There is a widely used and clichéd example for this; buying clothes that you see on an actor with the click of your remote control. Obviously they all need to be tagged and the part which is formed through the tagging process needs to be regulated. Soon we will see media formats which will support these functions on IPTV.
